Flash OCX control and Visual Studio 2005 issues

Posted by sharpstyle on March 28, 2007

Cross posted here SharpStyle Neutron blog.

As I was preparing for tutorial of using SharpStyle Neutron to develop an ActionScript project and Windows Forms within one solution, I ran into the following issue: while there are a number of references on the web on how to use Flash OCX within Visual Studio 2003, there are only a handful of results related to Visual Studio 2005 and most of them document the problems that people are having.

Following the steps from this article (Macromedia – Developer Center Embedding Macromedia Flash Player in a C# Application) produce the following errors:

There is a popup stating that VS ”Failed to import the ActiveX control. Please ensure it is properly registered”
If you examine Error List, under Warnings, you will see the following

Could not resolve dependent COM reference “stdole, Version=7.0.3300.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a”.

Failed to create the wrapper assembly for type library “AxShockwaveFlashObjects”. Exception of type ‘Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ComReferenceResolutionException’ was thrown.

The referenced component ‘AxShockwaveFlashObjects’ could not be found. Failed to create the wrapper assembly for type library “AxShockwaveFlashObjects”. Exception of type ‘Microsoft.Build.Tasks.ComReferenceResolutionException’ was thrown.

I found the following Unable to add Flash 8 control in VS2005 – Tentative workaround blog post from 2005-12-07, but the instructions there didn’t work. After doing a few more searches I found the following forum page in French (translated page / original page)

Here is what needs to be done:

Open Visual Studio 2005 command prompt and execute the following:
- aximp.exe – source “C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash\Flash9b.ocx”
This will generate the following files. Items in bold are the important ones:
- AxShockwaveFlashObjects.dll
- AxShockwaveFlashObjects.pdb
- ShockwaveFlashObjects.dll
- AxShockwaveFlashObjects.cs

In Visual Studio, add the references to the 2 dlls generated by aximp (I copied them from “C:\Program FIles\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC” to the root of the project):

Add namespaces to the imports section

using AxShockwaveFlashObjects;
using ShockwaveFlashObjects;

And here is some sample code to display SWF

AxShockwaveFlash axShockwaveFlash = new AxShockwaveFlash();
axShockwaveFlash.Location = new System.Drawing.Point(50, 50);

this.Controls.Add (axShockwaveFlash);
//this.Show(); // Avoids InvalidActiveXStateException.

axShockwaveFlash.Movie = "D:\\test.swf";
//* it is important to set Size after specifying Movie property
//* if Size is specified before, it is ignored
axShockwaveFlash.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(20, 20);
axShockwaveFlash.Play();

References:

Macromedia – Developer Center Embedding Macromedia Flash Player in a C# Application to Display Stock Information – an outdated article about embedding Flash Player in a C# Application using Visual Studio 2003
Unable to add Flash 8 control in VS2005 – Tentative workaround – post from 2005-12-07 that outlines the issue. Provided workaround didn’t work for me. Might be related to the fact that I have Service Pack 1 for VS installed
Add Flash to Your .NET WinForms to Create Skinable UIs – an older article from 2004 with source code. Didn’t try it.
Re Faied to import the ActiveX control. (Load Macromedia Flash) – MSDN Forums – post on MSDN forums with a link to the following article: User Interface Controls in Visual Basic 6 and Visual Basic 2005. Article talks about upgrading VB6 project to VB.NET 2005.

~Mike

This entry was posted on March 28, 2007 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Flash, Flash Player, Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2005, Web Development, Winforms Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

17 Responses to “Flash OCX control and Visual Studio 2005 issues”

gary said

April 6, 2007 at 9:44 am
I’m doing a site redesign at the moment and I am trying to get started with flash/ asp integration. Could i get the source code for this example? I know it is simple, but I am a bit stuck and I think it would really help me to get started.

Thanks
Gary

Reply
sharpstyle said

April 6, 2007 at 10:44 am
Hello Gary,

As you are interested in website development, combining ASP/ASP.NET with Flash, you might be interested in this tutorial: Tutorial — ActionScript and Web Application Solution (ActionScript 2)

~Mike

Reply
Thabo said

June 6, 2007 at 6:16 am
Hey there, thanx alot! Your blog helped!

Reply
sharpstyle said

June 6, 2007 at 9:21 am
Thanks for letting us know.

Reply
Jason Maskell said

July 23, 2007 at 10:52 pm
This helped a lot, thanks.

Reply
Riya said

August 21, 2007 at 5:24 am
|)
this is quite informatic…..

Reply
vidhi said

August 21, 2007 at 11:54 am
aximp commmand is giving an error:AxImp Error: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070005 (E_ACCESSDENI
ED)).plz help

Reply
sharpstyle said

August 21, 2007 at 12:07 pm
We haven’t run into this. A few things to check:
+ does OCX exist?
+ is OCX read-only?
+ do you have permissions on the directories?

let us know

Reply
Arvind said

October 29, 2007 at 10:38 am
Thanks a -LOT- for this information. I was just about to give up in frustration when I saw your article. It worked like a charm, even with the latest ocx from Adobe. Keep up the great work!

Reply
sharpstyle said

October 30, 2007 at 1:01 am
Thank you.

Reply
GreyStork said

April 18, 2008 at 10:51 pm
In cases where other components haven’t already done so, you will likely need to add the standard OLE library. You can do so by adding a reference to the COM library ‘OLE Automation’, normally located at ‘C:\Windows\System32\stdole2.tlb’.

Reply
~V~ said

July 5, 2008 at 3:38 am
Hi

I followed all steps given here but still facing same problem
I can’t add AxShockFlashPlayer Object to my form it gives error that it is not properly registred….

Please Help

Reply
Mikesquallmx said

September 15, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Actually I’m working with VB 2005 and I have problems in design time when I tried to use the Flash9f.ocx in a form. when I tried to put the ocxObject in the form, it appearsme the same massage box tha says: Could not resolves references form. I tried whith your method, but nothing in design time.

Reply
Mikesquallmx said

September 15, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Note: Sorry, I forgot, my project is a desktop project.

Reply
diro said

September 30, 2008 at 10:35 am
Hello. I’ve tried to do:

axShockWaveObject = new AxShockwaveFlash();
axShockWaveObject.Movie = “path to some movie”;
axShockWaveObject.Play();
//So far everything it’s fine but…

axShockWaveObject.Stop(); //Doesn’t work. I mean, it //doesn’t stop de .swf

Does anybody knows why?

Please answer

Reply
GUAN said

March 24, 2009 at 9:59 pm
I traced the message,”axShockwaveFlash.playing = fasle” when the flash is playing,what’s the matter? And I cannot control the “axShockwaveFlash” with “Stop()” or “PlayStop()”.

Reply
Jatender said

July 15, 2009 at 5:13 am
I have the same problem as GUAN stated

”axShockwaveFlash.playing = fasle” when the flash is playing,what’s the matter?

Please help me to solve this issue.
actually i want to know how can we detect flash clip finish playing in “axShockwaveFlash” control.so that we can run another clip.

Reply